Ancient Solutions for Anxiety

In the Buddhist tradition, the first step on the path to enlightenment is recognizing that suffering is an unavoidable part of life. This is a lesson that I have had a hard time learning. We want to believe that we are one right step away from a life free from pain and insecurity. I do, at least. I remember reading about Buddhism as a student in undergrad. It sounded depressing. And maybe it is a depressing idea that life will always  have suffering. But maybe its also true. 

Learning about Buddhism for a second time, it hit me how very true it is that life is always drawing me back into the suffering, into what the Buddhists call the samsara.  

Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham describes samsara as the wheel that is endlessly spinning. It is a circle of illusion in which we are always being brought back to the same struggles and pains. We believe that life progresses in a line towards improvement but samsara is always bringing us back to the beginning again.

Mipham asks you to imagine that your mind is a bowl of water. Our thoughts are the steam rising off the top. To take the metaphor a step further, as the water heats, and the molecules speed up, more steam begins rise.

This is just how anxiety feels. A boiling mind that won’t slow down. You don’t want to be thinking about anything, but slowing the tide of worries and dissatisfactions seems like an impossibility. It always feels as if you are one change away from things being right, but you never seem to reach the imagined place of satisfaction and security. 

To free ourselves from anxiety, we must learn to slow down and stop the churning mind. You cannot will boiling water to stop producing steam. You must take it away from the heat. You must let it cool, settle, and release energy.

Similarly we cannot simply stop a mind in its tracks. We must take it off the heat. We must allow it to settle, to cool, to release energy. To do this, we must take our minds away from the activity and bustle of our everyday lives. While we will always get sucked back into the day to day suffering of samsara, we can allow ourselves a gap. A space where we needn’t pay attention to our thoughts because there is no urgent necessity pulling for action. This is the purpose of meditation. To create a gap. To take the pot off the stove and let heat vent. To remember that we can be still - even if its just for a moment.

Pursuing Happiness - Part 1 - My Anxious Origins- Emily as a Toddler

I’m pretty sure I was born anxious, but I don’t remember back that far. 

My mother gushes with enthusiasm when she describes me as a small child. I was her baby. I was quiet and tiny and always clinging to her. I was polite and knew how to introduce myself and shake hands. I was great at setting the table. The stories about me are told from a distinctly adult point of view. The details are on how my action made the adults feel, but I am wondering what it was that I felt. 

Hmmm... am I flipping off the camera in this picture?

I have bits and pieces of memory from the time. I remember being on an airplane and trying to distract myself from the pain in my ears by playing with My-Little-Ponies. I remember pushing a little girl off my small trampoline into a play kitchen set and then looking up at my mother wide-eyed and innocent as I explained that the other girl didn’t understand trampoline safety procedures. I remember feeling older than everybody my age (and many above my age). It felt like I knew what I was doing. I was aware... and that made me nervous about all the things that could go wrong. Being nervous made me shy, which made me quiet, which made me sneaky. The sneakiness made me a lier and the lying turned me into a performer. I have bits and pieces but getting into the head of myself as a child is not as easy as it seems. The threads of time and continuity are stretched thin. I can piece together memories and pull out character traits, but it’s more difficult to say what I was thinking or how I was feeling. 

What was going on in the mind of the spritely four year old child I see on the family video? 

She looks up at the camera suspiciously, seeming uninclined to perform. My mothers voice comes in loudly “Emily... say hello to your grandparents”. The little girl squints at the camera and raises her eyebrows. She is not impressed. She attempts to ignore the situation, wandering over to the couch and fiddling with some paper. 

“Emily... sing a song for us.” Emily sighs heavily before giving in, making clear her distaste for the request, but as she sings a glint comes into her eye. If she is going to perform, she will do it well. She seems pleased with her performance and more likely to cooperate. 

My mothers voice begins questioning again. “What do you think of George Bush?” The tiny girl rolls her eyes. The words come out in a frustrated burst. “I don’t think anything about George Bush!” She seems aggravated by the question. She does not seem to know why the question bothers her but she is certain it is a trick. 

My mother tries a different tactic. “Do you look like your mommy?” she asks. The response is quick, practiced and indignant “I don’t look like my mommy, she just looks like me!” There is laughing off camera. The little girl scrunches up her face with irritation. She does not like being bothered. She does like being tricked. And she is certain that all of this a set up. Yet again, the adults in her life are trying to farm cuteness out of her. She seems torn between performing and being spiteful. In the end she picks both. 

My ferocious grimace 

When my mother questions the young me about her friends, the child slyly informs her that she has none. Everybody yells at her. While the little girl eventually concedes that her long time best friend Kate is a friend, she says that she is the only one. Everybody else yells at her. I am intrigued watching this. I remember being “yelled” at. I was a sensitive child and referred to any chiding in that way. People were telling me what to do and I didn’t like it. What is clear to me as I watch the video is that this young version of me is trying to mess up the video. She knows at the least that her mother is trying to extract something adorable from her, and she is set on delivering something else. 

When my mother asks if the girl’s father is her friend, she complains that he too yells at her. Then, a look of mischief appears on her tiny face. She tilts her head and looks up at the camera as she concocts a story in which her dad (not the family dog) was actually the one who recently peed on the carpet. When my mother laughs and says “Noooo... that was the dog.” She smiles and shrugs. The mischief does not leave her face. 

It is a noteworthy fact that the tape was never sent out. 

...not happy

When I think back, I remember being a child who was always in her head. I was shy. I was nervous. I was afraid to talk and even more afraid to talk about myself. Still, even at that point, I had developed a mask for performance. I had learned that sometimes you needed to pretend in order to get by. Sometimes the adults wouldn’t stop pestering you until you had given them a show. When I think back to my childhood, I remember worrying about a lot of things. But to be honest, I didn’t have much to worry about. I had parents who loved and cared for me. I had food, shelter, friends and family. But, even then, I was anxious. What I would learn so many years later is the truth about why.